The Importance of Requirements Engineering for Teaching Large Visualization Courses

Teaching visualization courses typically requires some kind of small-scale software project in which the students collaboratively create a software product with the goal to practically apply visualization concepts. This software focuses on providing an interactive solution to a given dataset scenario supporting the detection of insights based on users' tasks at hand. However, while creating such a tool several software development stages have to be taken into account, with requirements engineering as one of the major repeating stages. In this paper we describe three different visualization project-based teaching strategies TS_H, TS_M, and TS_L depending on the degree of freedom for the student groups. Moreover, they differ in the way how requirements engineering is an inherent ingredient in order to design, implement, test, deploy, evaluate, maintain, and evolve a certain software product. We experienced with more than 1,000 students in a total of 9 courses running over 8 weeks each, in approximately 2 years of time. All of the three teaching strategies have their own benefits and drawbacks, however, requirements engineering is considered more or less important, mostly depending on the degree of freedom the student project groups got during the courses. As a major outcome we consider the courses successful, not only because we learned the importance of requirements engineering for teaching project-based visualization courses, but also because many students passed the courses, the student evaluation was quite positive, and the written reports showed that they had an immense learning effect.